How parents can ruin their children’s future | 9 traits of toxic parenting

Kids are the most beautiful creations of God, whether they are humans or animals. Parents love their kids unconditionally, no matter which species they belong to. However, only humans have the intelligence and the power to raise their babies in a certain way so that they can develop their babies’ personalities and characters.

They say, “It takes a village to raise a kid”. However, there are no villages available now for helping you in raising a kid because socialization is more of a formal affair today. Therefore, it is surely very difficult to raise a child who is perfect in a holistic manner. Moreover, no one has the right to be judgemental about someone’s parenting style.

However, unfortunately, many parents make grave parenting mistakes during their children’s growth period without knowing how parents can ruin their children’s future. Almost all the child psychologists unanimously believe that unhealthy parenting can result in a badly behaved child and thus a spoilt adult who has no good future.

Nine Traits of Toxic Parents Who Ruin Their Children’s Lives

1. Not Spending Quality Time with Children:

Parents of our age are very busy juggling between multiple facets of their lives. They have to take care of the house, finances, bills, kids, jobs, careers, etc. Besides all of this, parents do not even realize when their mobile phones take up a higher priority than their own kids.

Further, parents find their mobile phone as a quick fix to handle bad behavior and tantrums of their kids. Hence, kids are ultimately drawn away from their parents. Such kids find it hard to socialize later in their lives. Thus, these kids have behavioral issues. It may also lead to a lot of stress and even depression. 

2. Not Talking to your Children:

Having a healthy communication with your child, from the day he or she is born, is very important. Nonetheless, parents face a shortage of time today and thus neglect this very essential aspect of how parents can ruin their children’s future.

This parent-child bond is necessary for the kids to drive them smoothly through their adolescence and early adulthood. Due to the absence of this connection, teenagers tend to find answers to their questions from their peers, the internet, or any immediately available source, which may or may not be correct or reliable.

If your child doesn’t find a reliable friend in you, you are actually building an angry, frustrated, and vulnerable child who is quite likely to trust a stranger and end up being in trouble.

3. Replacing your Time with your Money:

By nature, children need their parents’ time and a strong bond. However, today’s fast life makes it difficult for parents to cope with this. Therefore, they try to compensate for their time and love with their money. 

This initially starts by buying more and more toys for the baby, then employing a nanny to take care of the baby, sending him to a day-care or a boarding school, and finally letting their child do whatever they want with the money.

By this time, children realize that all they have is money and that money is more important than relationships. Not only do these children neglect the importance of emotions and relations but are also arrogant and spendthrift.

Moreover, such children do not know the real value of money and their lifestyle is extravagant. Such kids find it very hard to endure in adverse situations and lose it if for some reason they have to survive in lesser money.

4. Let Children Witness the Couple’s Toxic Relationship:

Every couple has issues, big or small. However, discussing your problems in front of your children, being verbally or physically aggressive or abusive, shouting, cursing, discriminating, etc. might harm your kids irreparably. 

Children learn not by listening to their adults but by imitating them. Never forget that your actions are speaking much louder than your words for your children. A toxic relationship between the parents of a child is one of the biggest means of how parents can negatively impact their kids’ lives.

If your child watches you not respecting your partner or not treating him or her equally, your child will learn the same and probably will act similarly with his or her future partner. This is one of the many long-term effects of toxic parents.

The examples that the parents or elder siblings set for a child stay with him forever. Thus, try to keep all the negativity away from your child. Discuss all your adult issues in your kid’s absence and do not let him witness any kind of aggression, abuse, or violence.

5. Expecting a Lot from the Children:

The day a mother conceives, parents start dreaming about their child. However, unknowingly, we start building up our expectations from an unborn baby. Therefore, when the baby is born and growing, we start forcing our expectations on our kids, which are sometimes irrational.

Most parents want their kids to outsmart them in intelligence, looks, and health. Therefore, they end up pressurizing their kids to do better in every possible manner. Some parents put their unrealistic expectations and faith in their children when it comes to sports and especially academics.

All of this pressure leads to a breakdown of confidence in a kid. When such a child grows up, he tends to believe that he is good for nothing. Moreover, many adolescent students decide to finish off their lives because they are unable to come up with their parents’ expectations.

6. Comparisons:

We all know that no two kids are the same. Still, we, as parents, find it very tempting to compare our kid to our neighbor’s kid, his cousin, our friend’s baby, and sometimes their own sibling.

A comparison between kids is another kind of pressure tactic that parents usually apply to improve the performance of their children, not knowing that they are doing more harm than good. This again leads to an under-confident frustrated child who either turns out to be a rebel or starts undermining his own potential.

Further, children also gradually start hating their peers, friends, cousins, or siblings who they were being compared with. This negatively affects their future relationships as well.

7. Over-protecting the Children:

Recently, global parenting change has suddenly emerged. It was rarely present when we were kids. Parents today want to protect their children from all evils, bad experiences, people, failures, and falls. A mother running towards her crying kid who has fallen in a garden is often a common scenario nowadays.

However, what most of these parents do not realize is that by protecting them from all these bad experiences, they are actually making their kids sensitive, vulnerable, weak, and unstable. Children who have been overprotected by their parents generally lack confidence in the later stages of their lives.

By falling and getting up on their own, by learning from their own mistakes, and by failing in life, children actually grow and make their own path towards success. Over-protective parenting is a kind of unhealthy parenting that leads to the kids being under-confident and fearful.

8. Lack of Trust:

For a kid, a child’s parents are his heroes. As a natural instinct, a child tends to trust whatever you say to him. However, if you continuously break a promise that you make, your child will slowly start losing his trust in you.

Further, when your child grows up to be a teenager and you assure him to trust you with his teenage issues, you should never let down his trust. Never get annoyed at your child when he shares something miserable with you that you did not want to hear. This will make him lose trust in you completely and your child will find it rather easier to discuss his problems with his friends.

Instead, discuss with your kid calmly about what went wrong in the situation and what could be a probable solution to his problem. Do not let the sense of mistrust penetrate down your child’s delicate mind because it may lead to your child having trust issues in relationships in his future life.

9. Instant Gratification:

Parents have a lot to take care of when it comes to their children. Therefore, many-a-times, we end up bribing our kids to accomplish certain chores or achieve something in their academics or sports. This is also known as instant gratification.

When you reward your kid instantly for a small achievement, the accomplishment of a task, or a small success, you are gratifying your kid instantly. However, they say that instant gratification is a major aspect of how parents can negatively impact on your life.

It is due to the instant gratification that children do not see the bigger picture. For example, you ask your toddler to clean up the mess of his toys and later reward him with chocolate. Your kid actually cleaned his toys because he wanted to have a chocolate and not because he is responsible.

Rather, a better approach would be to tell him that if he learns to clean his toys every day after he is done playing with them, he will become responsible. And with responsibility, he will gain more trust from his parents and then he will be rewarded with bigger and more sensible toys.

Benefits of delayed gratification are greater than this. Many successful people use the method of delayed gratification to achieve bigger benchmarks faster. Delayed gratification has a lot to do with making your children self-motivated and successful in life.